Location: Franklin Vermont

David E. Ballard is living retired at Washington, Kansas, at the age of eighty-one. Most of his active contemporaries in the strenuous achievements of his earlier years have long since passed away. Mr. Ballard is one of the few survivors of the prominent Kansans who actually laid the foundation of the state. His name is especially associated with the organization of Washington County and the establishment of Washington as its county seat. It was only a few years ago that he disposed of many of his extensive interests, and is now devoting his life to rest and travel. He had taken a permanent home at Miami, Florida, and just recently he returned from a visit to relatives at Lansing, Michigan, and Jamaica Plains, near Boston. Mr. Ballard inherits the splendid qualities of the New England type. He is descended from William and Grace Ballard, who came from England and settled at Andover, Massachusetts, in 1635. His father, Appleton Ballard, was born in New Hampshire in 1808, went to Vermont at the age of twenty-one, married there and became a farmer, and in 1837 located at Sparta, Ohio. There he worked at the trade of shoemaker, built a store, and in 1846 removed to the newly established town of Lansing, Michigan, where the capital of the state had just been located. He kept a store until it was burned, and...

HON. JOHN KELLY. – Prominent in almost every department of business and public life, Honorable John Kelly is known throughout the length and breadth of our state as a man of great abilities and irreproachable integrity. As a pioneer, none has a more deserving record, nor has sustained amore honorable part. Born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1818, he crossed the Atlantic to Canada in 1838, and in 1840 came to Franklin, Vermont. Three years later he began a career at the West, coming to Wisconsin, and there exercising his natural bent for business and capacity for organization, by which he has been distinguished, established a small woolen factory. But, finding the conditions unfavorable for a business of the dimensions that he desired to control, he sold out his interest and removed to St. Louis, seeking a wider opportunity. There he was led by his love of adventure to enlist for service in the Mexican war. In January of 1848 he was quartered with his regiment at Fort Leavenworth; and not until June following was the command ready to move to the seat of war. While en route, at Santa Fé, news was received that the war was over; and the regiment was ordered back to Jefferson Barracks. In 1849 Mr. Kelly received an appointment as wagon-master in the battalion of Colonel Loring to proceed to Fort Vancouver on the...